PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – The search for survivors of Haiti’s killer earthquake started to wind down as international rescue teams begin pulling back and aid, though more plentiful today, was still not enough for the masses left homeless and injured.
A desperately poor country before the 7.0 magnitude quake roiled its capital city, Port-au-Prince, on Jan. 12 and killed as many as 200,000 people, Haiti now looks to the world for basic sustenance.
“Are we satisfied with the job we are doing? Definitely not,” said Jon Andrus, deputy director of the Pan American Health Organization.
“But progress is being made. Think of what we started with when the world came crashing down on Haiti. No roads, only rubble and dead bodies. No communication, only death and despair.”
The strong 5.9 tremor that hit yesterday sent alarmed Haitians running away from buildings and walls but did not appear to cause any major new destruction or to slow the international relief effort now bolstered by more U.S. troops.
Violence and looting has subsided as U.S. troops provided security for water and food distribution and thousands of displaced Haitians heeded the government’s advice to seek shelter outside Port-au-Prince.
Sensitive to appearances the United States was taking too forceful a role, President Barack Obama said yesterday the White House was being “very careful” to work with the Haitian government and the United Nations.
“I want to make sure that when America projects its power around the world, it’s not seen only when it’s fighting a war,” Obama said on ABC News. “It’s got to also be able to help people in desperate need. And ultimately that will be good for us. That will be good for our national security over the long term.”
The United Nations praised the Dominican Republic for setting up a humanitarian aid corridor from Santo Domingo to Port-au-Prince and sending 150 U.N. troops to join a Peruvian contingent of U.N. blue helmets to protect the area.
U.S. Marines in landing craft brought ashore bulldozers, mechanical diggers and trucks on a beach at Neply village, west of Port-au-Prince, from warships anchored offshore. Pack-laden troops on the beach handed out food rations and set up temporary shelters for the homeless.
The USNS Comfort arrived in Haitian waters with its hospital and advanced surgical units. Around 12,000 U.S. military personnel are in Haiti and on ships offshore.
The United Nations is adding 2,000 troops and 1,500 police to the 9,000-member peacekeeping mission in Haiti.
A Florida search and rescue team left Haiti yesterday and it was reported that teams from Belgium, Luxembourg and Britain did as well.
U.S. and international teams have rescued 122 people, including three yesterday, and Haitians rescued many others in the hours and days after the quake.
Teams from Brazil, the United States and Chile were still working with sniffer dogs at the collapsed Montana Hotel in Port-au-Prince, where a whiteboard listed the names of 10 people found dead and 20 more still missing inside. Crews had treaded gingerly, shifting rubble by hand, but were switching to heavy machinery to dig up the bulk of the hotel.
“We’re looking for people alive or dead,” said Chilean Army Major Rodrigo Vasquez. “As well as being hopeful you have to be realistic and after nine days, reality says it is more difficult to find people alive but it’s not impossible.”
LACKING THE BASICS
Between 1 million and 1.5 million Haitians were left homeless and many were jammed into haphazard, open-air camps with no latrines.
“It’s miserable here. It’s dirty and it’s boring,” said Judeline Pierre-Rose, 12, camped in a park across from the collapsed national palace. “People go to the toilet everywhere here and I’m scared of getting sick.”
Residents have been sleeping outdoors because their homes were destroyed or out of fear that aftershocks would bring down more buildings.
Most of the basics of city life were still missing or barely functional in Port-au-Prince. Hospitals were overwhelmed and doctors lacked anesthesia, forcing them to operate on wide-awake patients with only local painkillers.
Doctors Without Borders said there were 10-to-12-day backlogs of patients at some of its surgical sites and they are seeing infections of untreated wounds.
“Some victims are already dying of sepsis,” the group said.
Aid groups brought in mobile kitchens and bakeries but struggled to feed the hungry. The World Food Program estimated there were 200 homeless encampments in Port-au-Prince alone, and urged the government to begin consolidating them to streamline aid distribution.
“We will probably need to feed between 1 to 2 million but it depends on the rate at which people leave the city,” said Thiry Benoit, WFP’s deputy country representative in Haiti.
STORM SEASON LOOMS
The city’s water system was only partially functional but tanker trucks began to deliver water to makeshift camps where people lined up to fill their buckets.
The Geneva-based International Organization for Migration (IOM), distributed tents, blankets and plastic sheeting provided by Japan and Turkey, but warned that more permanent shelter would soon be needed.
“Tents will not work in May when the long rainy season begins and later when hurricane season starts, but at this point there is not much choice,” said IOM Chief of Mission Vincent Houver.
Brazilian U.N. peacekeepers were leveling land in the Croix des Bouquets suburb of Port-au-Prince to set up a transitional tent camp at a site where the Inter-American Development Bank planned to help build permanent houses for 30,000 people. The plan would let displaced Haitians help build their own new homes under a food-for-work scheme, allowing them stay close to the area where they had made a living.
Landline telephones in Port-au-Prince were still down but two wireless networks had spotty service, said U.S. Federal Communications Commission officials helping with the relief.
More than 100 Haitian children were to arrive today in the Netherlands, where they were in the process of being adopted before the earthquake hit.
But UNICEF and other children’s aid groups said foreign adoption should be a last resort for Haitian youngsters whose parents were dead or missing, and that it was preferable to reunite them with their extended families.